Chapter Twenty-Three
May 25, age 17
“What do you have there?”
My cheeks pinked, the hair on the back of my neckstanding up. I tried not to make a fool of myself as I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply through my nose. Gathering my wits, I turned in my chair with a small smile. “Do you want to read it?”
Caliban extended his hand for the pages. “That depends. Is it any good?”
I turned away from my pile of homework, rotating in my chair to face him. He wasn’t looking me in the eye, and that was probably for the best. I blushed every time he came around. It was a struggle to get a coherent thought out around the Greek statue who’d come to life and strolled in and out of my imagination.
I offered him a stack of pages with both hands.
He took them and sank onto the bed, frowning. “What am I looking at?”
“Evidence of my genius, hopefully,” I said. I tried focusing past him, looking at the posters and twinkle lights and newspaper clippings I’d cut out and used to decorate my wall. But it was no use. My brain had conjured the perfect man. He occupied half of my daydreams as I ignored math class or tuned out in church. He was the only thing keeping me going on my hardest days. And looking at him now, his perfect, broad shoulders, the way his pecs stretched his shirt,his shock of mussed, white hair, the burning flame of his silver eyes, I could barely breathe.
I was crazy, of course. But at least this was the sort of insanity that helped me make it through the day. Seventeen was a hard age as it was. I’d be eighteen in a month, and then if I could survive until graduation, I’d be home free.
He turned the sheets around to show them to me. “One of these is already graded.”
I nodded slowly. “One of them is a fake assignment. I did the paper twice. It’s for our creative writing class, and I knew my mom wouldn’t approve of my topic. That’s the one in your left hand. The unmarked one.”
I tried to listen to the music softly playing from my boom box to distract myself from any impending judgment. I’d learned that if I kept the volume set to one, my parents wouldn’t hear it. The music may as well have been static. My vision vignetted as I saw only him. His eyes returned to the loose-leaf pages, scanning them thoroughly. He looked up at me once he reached the bottom of the page. “Necromancy?”
I nodded. “It’s a short scary story. The teacher said we could write about whatever we wanted, but my mom always checks over my assignments. So I wrote that one…” I gestured to the pile of papers in his right hand.
A crooked smile revealed a flash of white teeth. “You did not write an entire second short story about someone fighting for the constitution’s original meaning.”
“And I gave myself an A.” I grinned. I’d used my red pen to mark minor spelling errors and write a few grammatical suggestions. I’d gotten pretty good at mimicking handwriting over the years. Most rebellious students learned to copy their parents’ signatures so they could lie to their teachers. I wonder how many imitated their teachers’ so they could lie to their parents.
He put the faux story aside and turned the page on my necromancy story. It was five pages in total. By the time he finished, he looked genuinely impressed. “It’s excellent.You’re incredibly talented,” he said.
“You mean it?”
He restacked the papers, then looked at the opening line again. “It’s dark, to be sure. I don’t know if your teacher is going to be emotionally prepared for a suicide as your opening scene. I’m a little worried about her contacting the counselor, who would, of course, contact your mom. Your English teacher likes you, doesn’t she?”
I nodded. She did. She and the librarian were the only two human beings in that school who liked me. She’d used my assignment as an example of how to structure a paper in a past class, and her favoritism had never gone away. She’d fostered my creativity, giving me a safe space for expression and positive reinforcement whenever I tried something new. I suspected that if I had given her my fake story, she would have understood and volunteered to grade it.
“Why necromancy?” he asked, handing the pages back to me.
I thumbed the paper uncomfortably, unable to meet his gaze. “It was the scariest thing I could think of.”
“Interacting with the dead?”
I shook my head, looking up at him then. “No. The idea that death wouldn’t be the escape you thought it was. That even after you pass, you might not be free of your tormentors. The inability to escape a life like that…likemine…well, it would be worse than dying.”
***
September 17, age 26
I was still in my depression uniform, but at least I’d migrated from the bed to the couch. I turned ten-hour video footage of a fireplace on my television, alternated between honey-sweet coffee and amaretto on the rocks, and remained elbow-deep in the internet’s coverage of emerging angels, demons,and gods.
I toggled over to the green messaging app to see if Nia was seeing the same things I was.
(Marlow) How are things going over there?
(Nia) Estrid is intense, and really doesn’t like being away from her partner. Things with Darius are weird. And I still can’t get a hold of Kirby.
